Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
by Saucery
Summary: John's kind of a sex fiend. Rodney renegotiates the boundaries of their relationship.


**Cognitive Behavioral Therapy****  
><strong>

* * *

><p>"Oh, crap," said Rodney, and everyone tensed. They were sitting around the table in the conference room, and Rodney had his whole witness-my-genius-solution-and-squirm-in-confounded-confusion-you-intellectually-deficient-beings spiel going, so his suddenly breaking off in the middle of it was... not good. His staring at his computer like it had suddenly sprouted tentacles? Was even <em>less<em> good.

"What happened?" John leaned forward. He was sitting right next to Rodney, as usual, close enough to catch a whiff of his own aftershave wafting from Rodney's neck. That was nice - Rodney wearing John's aftershave. And his hickey, but that was on the left shoulder, so nobody could see it.

"Um, no. Never mind. It's just that the L2 waveforms are all over the place."

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. "And that means...?"

"Well, we could open up a black hole, but - "

"_What?_"

"- it'll only be a tiny one." Rodney held his forefinger and his thumb apart, as if to illustrate just how tiny it would be. "A really tiny one, okay?"

"That does not seem advisable," said Teyla, after several moments of ringing silence, in which even John forgot to inhale Rodney's aftershave. His aftershave. Their aftershave. Whatever.

Ronon snorted, in a no-kidding way, but seemed to be relaxing now that voices of reason were speaking up.

"Nah, it'll be fine. We'll just plug it back up. With anal beads."

Ronon _choked_. Teyla looked confused. Elizabeth... had a very interesting non-expression on her face.

John - wasn't sure what his own face looked like. But he was willing to bet that _he_ was the reason anal beads had made it into Rodney's recent memory and therefore into his repertoire of socially unacceptable, borderline autistic metaphors. Clearly, he would have to buy everyone drinks this weekend, just to make up for it.

"Rodney," said Elizabeth, patiently, in the way that usually preceded a major rank-pulling smackdown.

But Rodney, of course, was oblivious. "I mean," he said, still in his happy free-association place, "with Beleur particles. They're all shiny and slippery. They'll fit right in there."

"And that will be enough to plug the hole?" Teyla asked, in perfect innocence, and Ronon seemed to be having some kind of epileptic fit - limited only to his facial muscles.

"Yep! It'll be nothing like that fuck-up with the Large Hadron Collider. Those guys were _idiots_."

Elizabeth looked unconvinced.

"Wait, I'll run the sim again. With the particles thrown in." Rodney quickly pressed a couple of keys on his computer, and swiveled it around to face them. "See?" he beamed. "It works!"

The neon-colored, multi-level bundle of overlapping sine-curves (_ramen_, John thought) looked just as incomprehensible as before.

"Right," said John, hoarsely. "And that's the only way?"

Rodney flicked him an annoyed glance. "_Yes_, it's the only way, haven't you been _listening_ to me?"

What, like agreeing to the handcuffs wasn't listening enough?

"Of course, if you're going to open a black hole," Rodney smirked, "you might as well take it out to dinner, first."

John stared at him.

"Hey, just because it's an inter-dimensional equivalency, doesn't mean it's a _slut_."

Huh.

"What you're saying," said Elizabeth, sounding somewhat strained, "is that you want to do other things with the black hole while we have it open."

"Why not? It's not like we'll get the excu - er, opportunity to ramp up our ZPMs like that anytime soon."

"What do you suggest?"

"We might as well test Schliesling's Theory of Covariate Boson Transmission. Not to mention the..."

John tuned him out. So did everyone else, probably, but John was thinking back to the last time he and Rodney did anything that didn't involve fucking around in the bedroom. Or the bathroom. Or the balcony. Or the fake kitchenette (which was fake because Rodney had turned it into a miniature lab).

Fifteen minutes later, they were all piling out into the corridor, and Rodney clapped him on the shoulder.

"Colonel!" Rodney was almost bouncing on his feet. "Wanna watch it when we fire it up? It'll be in the hyperpocket," this was the name they'd given to the microscopic Atlantean device that could contain minor space-time anomalies and other impending disasters, "so it'll be invisible, but we'll project a real-time simulation on the lab wall, and everything."

Usually, John found ways to get out of lab-time that didn't involve _alone_-time, with Rodney and his increasingly anorexic tube of KY, but -

"Yeah, sure," he found himself saying, and Rodney grinned.

"Awesome. Not that you'll understand anything or be of any use at all - "

"Hey!"

" - but you _do_ have the only packet of organic, Earth-grown coffee beans left on the base."

"You want my coffee."

"Come on. Everyone's going to be too busy doing actual _work_ to run around making coffee for me. Even the morons." Obviously, Rodney didn't care whether anyone else got coffee. "But _you_ could get me some, right?"

John tried not to feel like a secretary from the 1950s. He glanced down at his legs - nope, no nylon stockings. "You want me for my coffee."

"What, was there something else?" Rodney's smile was unexpectedly arch, and razor sharp - and made John twitch in his pants.

"Uh," said John, as Rodney brushed right past him and down the stairs.

Damn.

Okay, then. Maybe the handcuffs and the beads could wait. Atlantis was kind of low on romantic honeymoon destinations and long walks by the beach, but there had to be _some_ places he could take a megalomaniacal genius on a date, right?

And that was the last of his java, too.

_Damn_.

* * *

><p><strong>fin.<strong>**  
><strong>

Please review!


End file.
